Great News! The next CyborgCamp will be in early May of 2010. That means its time to start planning!

This meeting is everyone’s chance to brainstorm on location ideas, sponsors and speakers. What kinds of topics are of interest to you? How has the idea of Cyborg evolved over the last year? What new kinds of technologies have arrived on the scene?

We’ll discuss volunteers and the wiki too. Come along, especially if you helped make CyborgCamp PDX ‘08 so excellent in the first place. Bring snacks and drinks to share with others.

This planning meeting will most likely be followed by general networking and fun at a local haunt.

RSVP on Upcoming.org

Where:

AboutUs.org

107 SE Washington Street, Suite 520
Portland Oregon 97214
United States

When:

Tuesday, January 19, 2010 from 7–9pm

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What is CyborgCamp?

CyborgCamp is an unconference about the future of the relationship between humans and technology. We’ll discuss topics such as social media, design, code, inventions, web 2.0, twitter, the future of communication, cyborg technology, anthropology, psychology, and philosophy.

CyborgCamp’s aim is to have many communication channels, such as Twitter, Flickr, UstreamTV, Video and Audio recordings and live chats displayed on the screen.
Why May 2010? In March 2010, CyborgCamp will make its way to Brazil and back before landing again in Portland, Oregon for its second year.

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Questions? Contact Amber Case @caseorganic or MJ @mama_j.

You can also follow @cyborgcamp on Twitter for updates.

Tonight, Microsoft and others kindly sponsored a Silverlight 2 Release Party at North Portland’s North Agency.

North has a beautiful building. If you’ve never been there before, it’s located at 1515 NW 19th Ave in one of the newest and strangest areas of Portland. North is an advertising agency who, according to one of their spokeswoman, “connects brands with people using film, design and music”. North has been occupying their current location for a little over a year.

The first presenter was Tim Heuer, a Senior Program Manager for Microsoft Silverlight. The rest of the program was open, which allowed everyone to walk around to different demo stations featuring Silverlight locals Erik Mork, Kelly White, and Jason Mauer.

Deep Zoom

DeepZoom provides the ability to zoom almost arbitrarily large images in Silverlight in a really nice manner. Jason Mauer presented Deep Zoom for a series of images randing from maps to standard JPEG photos. The scaling mechanism of DeepZoom was very impressive.

DeepZoom allows mutiple images to be displayed at very small and very large scale without affecting performance of the application displaying the image. The only property affecting performance is the number of pixels to be displayed on screen.

Demo

Hard Rock Cafe has a website that uses Deep Zoom, but you have to have Microsoft Silverlight installed in order to use it. I highly suggest checking it out, though — especially if you like super-close-up images of guitar frets.

BizSpark

BizSpark is kind of like Microsoft’s version of Y!Combinator. It is a new program for supporting startups and entrepreneurs. To be eligible for BizSpark, all of the following your Startup must be:

• In the business of software development,
• Privately held,
• Have been in business for less than 3 years, and
• Have less than US $1 million in annual revenue.

To be eligible to use the software for production and deployment of hosted solutions Startups must also be developing a new “software as a service” solution (on any platform) to be delivered over the Internet.

Raffle

There was a raffle at the end for a bunch of books. Jason Mauer made a random number generator in Silverlight in order to choose raffle winners. I found that pretty cool. I picked up a book on Professional LINQ, which I am going to have a lot of fun with. I was also talking to Adron Hall about Yahoo! Pipes and doing a side-to-side comparison of Silverlight’s capabilities vs. the capabilities of Pipes.

PDXUX

The PDXUX group will be meeting the third Tuesday of every month, beginning in January. Visit the PDXUX website for details.

Thanks to North, Microsoft, and PDXUX et al., for a successful and curious event.

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Amber Case is a Cyborg Anthropologist and Tech Journalist from Portland, Oregon. You can follow her online @caseorganic.

In the analog state of PR, people would have to manually check out how many times a brand was mentioned in newspapers by hiring a bunch of people to clip out the actual articles from the newspapers. If one’s clippings were really great that week, they’d have a big stack of paper.

Clipping New Media:

Some of the first industries to capture digital data real-time were hedge funds and other financial firms. They used something that resembled an intelligence dashboard — where different streams of data were needed to make complex decisions. The dashboard allowed users to see many different stocks at once, and companies were able to create a sort of proto-feed that showed many different ecosystems of data at once.

Intelligence Feeds Today:

Now, services like Netvibes and Yahoo! pipes can be mixed together to offer companies real-time intelligence feeds that show what their competitors are posting on their blogs, what people are saying about them on Twitter, and their overall online presence — all in one place.

Making these intelligence dashboards takes time and research, but the value added (not to mention the time saved) by the implementation of a centralized data source is immense. Also, it’s powerful enough for agencies that manage multiple clients, because the entire system fits into one browser window with a series of custom, labeled tabs.

Currently:

All brands have an analog version of this, and some have a digital one — but all brands need it. Google Alerts is a temporary solution that is gritty and granular. It does not have the customization capabilities that Yahoo! Pipes and Dapper have. Intelligence dashboards are capable of handling the data generated by global and local brands as well. They can monitor Flickr photos, news items, blog posts, ect. Basically, any piece of dynamic content that moves online.

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Resources

One of the best brand managers out there is Portland’s Dawn Foster. She has a collection of excellent resources (like Yahoo Pipes and RSS Hacks) on her blog, Fast Wonder. She’s actually the first person who introduced me to Yahoo! Pipes.

Unconferences are really good at collecting gobs of data, like Flickr photos, Tweets, and session notes.

Following Twitter conversation is simple by subscribing to Twitter feeds from search.twitter.com, but often event hashtags are unstandardized or misspelled. It’s always nicer to be able to subscribe for a single feed than a bunch of overlapping feeds. Additionally, there is often duplicate content.

There are also Flickr pictures involved, and it would be nice to be able to get get all of the updates from drop.io, Flickr, and Twitter in one feed, so that one can see how the event is progressing in real time.

So I did just that.

This Yahoo! Pipe for WhereCamp PDX grabs FlickrPhotos, the Google Map Location, drop.io session note updates, and Twitter Feeds.

Components used:

Sources (4)

flickr.com
api.flickr.com
twitter.com
search.twitter.com

Modules (4)

fetch
sort
union
flickr

An image of the Pipe’s Construction is here.

One of the great things about WhereCamp PDX is that you can E-mail session notes, pictures and other resources to a drop.io box. To do this, simply send an E-mail wherecamppdx@drop.io. You can see the drop.io inbox for session content here.

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Amber Case is a Cyborg Anthropologist and Social Media Consultant from Portland, Oreogn. You can follow her online at @caseorganic.